ELF Activist Daniel McGowan Released After 7 Years in “Little Guantanamo”

Earth Liberation Front activist Daniel McGowan, who was the subject of last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary “If A Tree Falls,” has been released from federal prison after seven years.

McGowan was one of a dozen underground environmental and animal rights activists with the ELF and its sister movement, the Animal Liberation Front, who were swept up in a two year, multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional investigation called ‘Operation Backfire,’ which culminated in a series of high-profile arrests and prosecutions at the end of 2005 and beginning of 2006. (Two weeks ago, Rebecca Rubin, one of the three remaining fugitives in the investigation, turned herself in at the U.S.-Canada border.) The activists were charged with committing a series of arsons and other property crimes against numerous targets that they deemed to be agents of environmental destruction and animal exploitation, including U.S. Forest Service ranger stations, a horse slaughterhouse, a dairy farm, lumber company facilities, SUV dealerships, wild horse corrals, a university horticultural research center, a meat company, and, most famously, the Vail Ski Resort.

Though none of the crimes targeted people nor resulted in human death or injury, the Justice Department wasted little time in publicly declaring the arrestees “terrorists.” At a 2006 press conference announcing the defendants’ indictments, FBI Director Robert Mueller referred to perpetrators of environmental and animal rights-related crimes as one of the agency’s “highest domestic terrorism priorities.” Congress passed legislation that year specifically singling out animal rights activists for enhanced criminal penalties, classifying property crimes against industries that exploit animals and even, in some contexts, First Amendment activities directed at agents of those industries, as “terrorism.” No such special legislation has ever been passed to selectively brand white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists, anti-immigrant vigilantes and right-wing militias — all of which have targeted, injured and killed humans — as terrorists.

McGowan was detained in two different prisons, both of them belonging to a category of new experimental facilities called “Communications Management Units,” or CMUs (he also spent a brief period of his incarceration in general population). CMUs were built to contain low-level terrorists rounded up in the War on Terror; most of their prisoners are alleged to be connected to Islamic networks. They are designed to severely restrict and control the amount and nature of inmates’ communications with the outside world, earning them the nickname among inmates and prison staff of “Little Guantanamo,” according to journalist Will Potter. For several years, their existence was kept secret. There are only two CMUs in the United States, in Illinois and Indiana; McGowan served time in both.

For the next six months, McGowan will be living in a halfway house in New York City, and then be under supervised release for three years.

ELF and ALF activists have been demonized by prosecutors, politicians, law enforcement officers and the media as terrorists, sociopaths, ordinary criminals hiding behind an ideology or, at best, naïve kids with overly romantic notions of what it means to fight for a cause. However, a more disinterested, less agenda-driven observer might recognize the near inevitability of their movement’s dialectical emergence out of a prevailing political culture that has stubbornly refused to even begin to address some of the most dire and vexing problems facing every living thing on the planet. When mainstream political institutions fail to rise to the scale and urgency of epochal crises like global warming, deforestation or massive species extinction —in some cases, even failing to acknowledge their reality — among those who understand what’s at stake, there will be some who are driven to desperate acts.

The ELF and ALF could never be the solution to the problems they point to, but neither are they merely incidental to them: radical movements tend to be harbingers of the struggles to come when ossified political systems bury their heads in the sand rather than measure up to the profound challenges they face and to their own internal contradictions. Rather than vilify McGowan as a terrorist or mythologize him as a martyr for the earth, we should consider his story for what it tells us about a civilization so blind to its circumstances that it provokes individuals to engage in extreme political acts and risk serving years in Little Guantanamos in order to do something to stem an unfolding catastrophe.